Outdated Browser

For the best experience using our website, we recommend upgrading your browser to a newer version or switching to a supported browser.

More Information

Turkey

A black-and-white photo of a brick arch bridge over a river. Two men stand in the rocky sand at...

Malabadi Bridge, Diyarbakır. Photo credit: SALTOnline, No restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons.

A Splendid Impossibility

By Murat Özyaşar

Writer Murat Özyaşar on why he doesn’t write in his mother language and what it means to speak a “split tongue.”

Translated from Turkish by Will Washburn

MultimediaMultilingual

February-2024-Mother-Language-Day-List-Feature (1)

Clockwise from top left: Bikash Dihingia, Risten Sokki, Imran Sada'i, Boubacar Boris Diop, Gawani Gaongen, Jean D'Amerique, Adriana Paredes Pinda, Emiliana Bernard-Stephenson

International Mother Language Day: 8 Writers to Read Now

By Words Without Borders

In celebration of International Mother Language Day, we’re spotlighting 8 writers working in their heritage languages, from Wolof and Kankanaey to Uyghur and Mapudungun.

The covers of the nine books featured in the list: Suee and the Strange White Light, The House...

World Kid Lit Month: Read Around Asia

By Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp, Kelly Zhang & Hongyu Jasmine Zhu

This World Kid Lit Month, join us for a tour of Asia with the best of translated Asian literature for young people, including picture books, middle-grade and YA fiction, and graphic novels.

The covers of the books featured in the August Watchlist: The Details, Lojman, Wenling's, A Practical...

The Watchlist: August 2023

By Tobias Carroll

Tobias Carroll recommends new and exciting reads from Angola, Italy, Poland, Spain, Sweden, and Turkey.

black and white drawing of a boy with smoke coming up behind him floating over a red mound

Julia Griffin, "Smoke." Copyright Julia Griffin

Three Poems

By Imran Sada’i

I sit on the shores of emptiness / and watch my soul foaming red

Translated from Uyghur by Joshua L. Freeman

MultimediaMultilingual

The covers of the books featured in the list

Your #IWD2023 Reading List

By Words Without Borders

In honor of International Women's Day 2023, WWB recommends 10 forthcoming books written and translated by women and published by small presses.

Portrait of writer Deniz Dağdelen Düzgün

The City and the Writer: In Izmir with Deniz Dağdelen Düzgün

By Nathalie Handal

The thing that surprises me the most is that parchment paper was invented in Izmir.

A dark room where only a small sliver of window lets in any light

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

A Friendly Face

By Sevgi Soysal

Just what she needed. An outing with a man just released from prison.

Translated from Turkish by Maureen Freely

PEN International Celebrates 100 Years

By Joanne Leedom-Ackerman

PEN members today not only gather for literary events in their home countries and internationally but also defend writers and the freedom to write worldwide.

Tribades

By Nazlı Karabıyıkoğlu

Whatever you do in Turkey, you do it alone.

Translated from Turkish by Ralph Hubbell

A person holds a lit cigarette in front of pursed lips.

Photo by Dimitri Bong on Unsplash, Unsplash

Elfiye

By Nazlı Karabıyıkoğlu

They looked at me like I was sick.

Translated from Turkish by Ralph Hubbell

Peripatetics: The Essays of Jazmina Barrera, Karen Villeda, and Mariana Oliver

By Charlotte Whittle

These are essays with a roving gaze whose authors travel through geographic and intellectual spaces with the same ease with which we used to walk around in New York.

Özdamar’s Tongue

By Mariana Oliver

Özdamar knew that arriving in a country with no return ticket meant voluntarily surrendering to an indeterminate foreignness.

Translated from Spanish by Julia Sanches

The Desire to Travel Responsibly Must Come before the Desire to Learn through Literature

By Tomaso Biancardi

There is a surer way for international literature to make us better tourists.

The Importance of Stories in an Era of Division

By Elliot Ackerman

With much of our world deeply divided, stories such as these become more essential than ever to ease our collective pessimism.

Picture of a chimpanzee in a zoo enclosure.

Picture by © Vyacheslav Argenberg / http://www.vascoplanet.com/, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Muzaffer and Bananas

By Yalçın Tosun

We were both quite fat, but Ali’s body carried more promise than mine.

Translated from Turkish by Abby Comstock-Gay

The Canary

By Deniz Tarsus

Every night before they went to sleep, the people of the village imagined their own deaths.

Translated from Turkish by Ayça Türkoğlu

All the Streets of the City

By Behçet Çelik

“From here on out it’s rooftop to rooftop, hocam.”

Translated from Turkish by Abby Comstock-Gay

The Terrorist Upstairs

By Emrah Serbes

I’m twelve years old, I won’t have to do a lot of time, I’ll be out before you know it.

Translated from Turkish by Abigail Bowman

Garine

By Karin Karakasli

“Erzurum is a wound I carry inside me.”

Translated from Turkish by Ayça Türkoğlu

The Little Bathroom

Did she or her housemates know about the secret of the bathroom?

Translated from Turkish by Ayça Türkoğlu

“It’s Us and Them”: Writing from and about Divided Countries

By Susan Harris

In the current environment of relentless political strife . . . debate deteriorates into name-calling; partisans morph into zealots, complex issues are reduced to binary terms, and hostility seethes just beneath the surface.

The Angels Who Wiped My Fate Clean

I was bound. I was a registered piece of inventory. I was a liability. I wasn’t going anywhere.

Translated from Turkish by Dayla Rogers

And What If Love Is Stronger? The Queer Issue

By Susan Harris

In this troubling context, the need for portrayals of queer lives around the world becomes even more urgent.

June 2017 Queer Where Are You My Love Beldan Sezen Feature

Where Are You, My Love?

By Beldan Sezen

© 2017 Beldan Sezen. Translation of the text © 2017 Charlotte Collins. Translation of the signs and newspaper headlines © 2017 Canan Marasligil. All rights reserved.

Translated from German by Charlotte Collins & Canan Marasligil

Multimedia

The Minibus

What do you want us to do, sit on their heads?

Translated by Canan Marasligil

An Endless Green Line

By Gianluca Costantini & Elettra Stamboulis

Every town had two soccer teams. A right-wing one and a left-wing one.

Translated from Italian by Jamie Richards

Comics and Graphic Narratives: A Global Cultural Commons

By Dominic Davies

Comics themselves have a role to play in the construction of a more globally aware social consciousness.

The Gold Watch

''The clock inside has no numbers, it has only memories.''

Translated from German by Rebecca Heier

from “The Lost Lands of Paradise”

By Yavuz Ekinci

Aram's mutilated body on that tree had grown larger and larger in my mind.

Translated from Turkish by Kardelen Kala

Omaira

By Murathan Mungan

You had no name when we met / we did not notice it wasn’t there

Translated from Turkish by Aron Aji & David Gramling

Multilingual

Breaking the Taboo: Turkish Writers Face the Kurdish Past

By Alber Sabanoglu

We were forced by the state itself to take sides.

Mirror Shock

By Murat Özyaşar

If you look in the mirror too long it hits you.

Translated from Turkish by Hardy Griffin

The Nights Passing Endlessly through Scheherazade’s Mouth

By Exmetjan Osman

I was more or less enjoying the daytime / I was watching grass sprout from cracks in the asphalt

Translated from Uyghur by Joshua L. Freeman

Multilingual

To the Islands

By Alber Sabanoglu

Under her feet, the boat was shaking and creaking as bigger, stronger waves were beginning to hit it.

Translated from Turkish by the author

Multilingual

The Map

It's a General Map of Man with a special interpretation.

Translated from Turkish by Robert P. Finn

Multilingual

Desert Lights

By Murathan Mungan

Before winter arrives you must / hire a handsome assassin

Translated from Turkish by Aron Aji

The Waiter

By Sait Faik Abasiyanik

There, in a corner of the deck over the water, she sits like a ghost, facing away from the sea, silently smoking her cigarette.

Translated from Turkish by Aron Aji

Selam Berlin

It all began on a Thursday evening in November 1989. From that night on, things would never again be the same.

Translated from German by Tim Mohr

The Knowledge Holder Doesn’t Choke on Cleverness

By Feridun Zaimoglu

Who taught child's heart cruelty? How were you lured to the poison dish?

Translated from German by Kristin Dickinson, Robin Ellis & Priscilla Layne

Green Card

By Petros Markaris

He was wearing a pair of threadbare jeans and a checked shirt. There was a cardboard sign hanging round his neck.

Translated from Greek by David Connolly

For Years

The hospital odors do not offend anymore.

Translated from Turkish by Candan Baysan

In Conversation

By Claire Messud

Buket Uzuner: I met Claire Messud in Istanbul in November 2007 while she was visiting the city as one of the guest writers of the Istanbul Book Fair. A week before I met her, I started to read her very…

Coffee Grinds

By Seyhan Erözçelik

People hold hands . . . this one in front, the other by the feet, the other by and by, a tower of people toward the sky.

Translated from Turkish by Murat Nemet-Nejat

An illustration of a girl in a red and white tutu standing on the back of a white horse in front...

Popular Graphic Arts, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Tante Rosa, Would-be Horse Acrobat

By Sevgi Soysal

Rosa would no longer be falling off of horses. Instead, she would bag the manure of the circus animals and sell it to villagers.

Translated from Turkish by Amy Spangler

Door

By Birhan Keskin

Pass through me, I'll remain, I'll wait, pass through me, / but where you pass through me I cannot know.

Translated from Turkish by George Messo

The Train

By Murathan Mungan

We carry within us the greatest secret in life.

Translated from Turkish by Ruth Christie

The Hidden Me

By Murathan Mungan

Here is the photograph. It was taken on the day my father came out of the Diyarbakır Prison.

Translated from Turkish by Ruth Christie

Sacrifice

By Küçük Iskender

left and right cigarettes lit, burnt out / each drag starts with my love,

Translated from Turkish by Murat Nemet-Nejat

From “Harbinger”

By Müge Iplikçi

from the very beginning some people said that it was a disorder.

Translated from Turkish by Esen Köybaşi

The Prisoner

By Asli Erdogan

She woke up long before the alarm.

Translated from Turkish by Deniz Perin

Tunnel

By Birhan Keskin

The roads I walked didn't tire me,

Translated from Turkish by George Messo

Water

By Birhan Keskin

I won't talk anymore, I won't say harsh words in the morning for a dream I embroider a flower of pearl on my bosom.

Translated from Turkish by George Messo

Story of an Island

By Yaşar Kemal

And in the desert between the two rivers the battle which had been going on for many days continued.

Translated from Turkish by Angela Roome

From “Black Sky, Black Sea”

By Izzet Celasin

Here and in many other places, İstanbul was preparing for the May Day rallies.

Translated from Norwegian by Kari Dickson

Multilingual

From “City in Crimson Cloak”

By Asli Erdogan

A huge army clad in black suddenly spreads over the horizon; it approaches at a gallop, full speed, and attacks just like that, without warning.

Translated from Turkish by Amy Spangler

Offering II

By Ece Temelkuran

You are water. / You are afraid of and for the stones you will strike as you flow.

Translated from Turkish by Deniz Perin

House of the Edge

By Ece Temelkuran

Purify your tongue and all you’ve seen / Gather your illuminated words onto snow white paper

Translated from Turkish by Deniz Perin

Seven Aches

By Ece Temelkuran

After grasping the games and their rules / The fatigue of participation becomes less and less bearable.

Translated from Turkish by Deniz Perin

From “Leyla”

By Feridun Zaimoglu

Heaven rains down bread in little hard crumbs of dough, and whoever catches them may either become happy or choke on them.

Translated from German by Margot Bettauer Dembo